Tuesday, April 1, 2008

How many of you periodically backup your important files? Not many. Again, how many times did it happen to you that you changed the contents of your document and then wished you hadn't, but then there is usually no way of recovering the earlier version of the file? Very frustrating. I had previously wrote how you can avoid this by saving several versions of the same MS Word file in Word 2002. Now by using this program that I have stumbled across, you can extend this functionality to any files you choose.

DocShield is a software program for Microsoft Windows operating systems that is designed to prevent or remedy the catastrophic loss or accidental modification of important electronic documents. It protects these documents by continually monitoring them for changes, then creating and storing snapshots of those documents as they change through time. DocShield runs silently in the background and monitors the files and folders that you specify for changes.

Whenever it detects any changes it creates a "snapshot" of the file and store it in a compressed achieve. The archive can be kept in more than one location, or remotely through FTP for added protection. The archive of shielded files may exist on a local disk, a network disk, or other storage devices.

When a new "snapshot" of a document is written to an archive, it will automatically be written to the archive in each of the destination folders. You can specify how often you want DocShield to check on the documents, to see if any of them need to have a "snapshot" taken This time interval may be anywhere from every second to every few days.

DocShield is portable and using the "DocShield USB utility" you can copy the archive of files to a USB drive. The program is free for personal use. There are some additional features which are available only if you buy the product. DocShield requires .NET Framework 2.0 to function.